OF WILD ANIMALS 55 



sible " things. We have matched our wits against rat cunning 

 until a madhouse yawned before us. Twice in my life all my 

 traps and poisons have utterly failed, and left me faintly 

 asking : Are rats possessed of occult powers? Once the answer 

 to that was furnished by an old he-one who left his tail in 

 my steel trap, but a little later caught himself in a trap-like 

 space in the back of the family aeolian, and ignominiously 

 died there, a victim of his own error in judging distances 

 without a tape line. 



Tomes might be written about the minds and manners of 

 the brown rat, setting forth in detail its wonderful intelligence 

 in quickly getting wise to new food, new shelter, new traps and 

 new poisons. Six dead rats are, as a rule, sufficient to put any 

 new trap out of business; but poisons and infections go farther 

 before being found out.* 



The championship for keen strategy in self-preservation 

 belongs to the musk-oxen for their wolf-proof circle of heads 

 and horns. Every musk-ox herd is a mutual benefit life 

 insurance company. When a gaunt and hungry wolf-pack 

 appears, the adult bull and cow musk-oxen at once form a 

 close circle, with the calves and young stock in the centre. 

 That deadly ring of lowered heads and sharp horns, all hung 

 precisely right to puncture and deflate hostile wolves, is im- 

 pregnable to fang and claw. The arctic wolves know this well. 

 Mr. Stefansson says it is the settled habit of wolf packs of 

 Banks Land to pass musk-ox herds without even provoking 

 them to "fall in" for defense. 



Judging by the facts that Charles L. Smith and the Norboe 

 brothers related to Mr. Phillips and me around our camp-fires 

 in the Canadian Rockies, the wolverine is one of the most 

 cunning wild animals of all North America. This is a large 

 order; for the gray wolf and grizzly bear are strong candidates 

 for honors in that contest. 



The greatest cunning of the wolverine is manifested in rob- 



*For home use, my best rat weapon is rough-on-rats, generously mixed with butter and 

 spread liberally on very thin slices of bread. It has served me well in effecting clearances. 



